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Viola Sonata

Introduction

Easily Clarke’s most impressive and well-known work is the Sonata for Viola and Piano written in 1918/19. This was entered for the Coolidge Competition that year, again under the pseudonym ‘Anthony Trent’. The prize was generous for the time at $1,000, and 73 entries were registered. The six members of the jury came to a point where they were undecided between two works. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (the founder and benefactor of the competition) gave her casting vote to Ernest Bloch’s Suite for Viola. However, the jury was so impressed by ‘Anthony Trent’s’ work that they demanded to know the identity of the composer. Miss Coolidge said to Rebecca Clarke afterwards: ‘You should have seen their faces when they saw it was by a woman!’

Overnight Clarke became a cause célèbre, both in England and America. Several performances of the work were given and it was published by Chester in 1921. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was so impressed by the Viola Sonata that she commissioned a Rhapsody for cello and piano from Clarke which was performed in 1923 at the Berkshire (Massachusetts) Festival by May Mukle and Myra Hess.

The Viola Sonata is in three movements and is headed by a quotation from Alfred de Musset’s poem La Nuit de Mai:

The first and third movements are big-boned pieces with a clear thematic link between them, and the second is a brilliant but delicate scherzo in compound time. The language has that ambiguous quality mentioned earlier, where Debussy and Ravel (particularly of the Piano Trio) mix with the Englishness represented by modality and the flexibility of melody inspired by folksong. It is very much of its period, and the fantasy-like character of the outer movements places it firmly in the style of music favoured by English composers of the time, especially as encouraged by the Cobbett Competitions. (These stipulated the composition of a single-movement piece with a variety of moods suggestive of larger forms in the spirit of the ‘fantasy’ which was common in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.)

In 1939 Rebecca Clarke visited America, and was there when war was declared. She was denied a return visa and thus forced to stay in the USA. She worked as a nanny to a family in Connecticut for a while, but visiting New York in 1944 she met James Friskin with whom she had been a student at the Royal College of Music and who was now teaching at the Juilliard School. They were both unmarried and in their late fifties and decided to marry, which put the seal on Clarke’s decision as to whether or not to return to England. She remained in New York until her death in 1979.

Recordings

'Paul Coletti proves an eloquent advocate for music which is little known but offers rewards in abundance … a most stimulating programme which is ...'Exemplary performances one and all: a most distinguished recorded debut' (Gramophone)» More